South Korean officials said the isolated nation may even be willing to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for security guarantees from the US, according to The New York Times.

President Donald Trump claimed he was behind the potential diplomatic opening, given his administration’s deep-cutting economic sanctions against North Korea.

Yet North Korea has a checkered history of adhering to nuclear treaties, and the proposal may exploit Trump’s ire toward Kim, not to mention his administration’s rigid diplomatic stance toward North Korea.

“People are saying, ‘They promised to stop nuclear tests and missile tests,'” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear-policy expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told Business Insider. “What I saw was that they promised to stop those tests while they were negotiating with the United States.”

To Lewis, who also publishes Arms Control Wonk, a requirement for direct US involvement in talks “sounds less like a promise to stop and more like a permission slip” to continue testing.

What’s more, he added, Kim’s proposal is poised to significantly weaken economic sanctions that the Trump administration has leveraged against North Korea.

How the offer could help North Korea and undermine Trump, US interests

Trump has not been shy about his disdain for Kim, often calling the leader “little rocket man” and threatening him with the size of Trump’s “nuclear button.”

Lewis said the Trump administration’s sanctions were indeed painful to North Korea. But he noted that Kim was probably most concerned about ending joint military exercises around the Korean Peninsula between US forces and their allies, such as South Korea and Japan. Such activity heightens tensions and could lead to catastrophic miscalculations, Lewis previously told Business Insider.

“They’ve always wanted those military exercises shut off, because military exercise is how real wars start – that’s the cover that everybody gives for amassing troops,” Lewis said. “So basically they have to go on alert every time we do them. And we used to do them during the harvest, which was not nice.”

Offering a peace deal could motivate South Korea to stall or cancel the next joint military exercise, which is scheduled for the spring.

“From a North Korean perspective, they’d like to get the cancellation of the exercises. But this also helps them manage their sanctions problem,” Lewis added. “If they’re seen as saying, ‘Look, we’re willing to stop the missile tests, just as soon as the US shows up,’ but then the US doesn’t show up,” then it’s a potentially big win for Kim.

But acting tough against Kim’s offer, or simply ignoring it, could backfire.

“If they then do another missile test, how does the sanctions fight play out?” Lewis said. “The South Koreans and the Russians and the Chinese all refuse to back more sanctions because they’ll say, ‘Well, there’s a standing offer from the North Koreans that you’re not taking.’ … At the end of the day, what they’re really looking at doing is countering the US campaign of pressure.”

China and Russia might also spin a lack of US talks to weaken or ignore existing sanctions, since those countries “don’t really owe us any favors,” Lewis said. Even South Korea may join them as it pushes for an opportunity to make peace with its adversarial neighbor.

caption

A US Navy F-18 fighter jet taking off during a joint military exercise called between South Korea and US in the Sea of Japan last March.

“This is generally how the sanctions game is played, and it’s just that the Trump administration is really bad at it,” Lewis said. “The whole point of sanctions is to get pressure on another country to do something.”

He added: “You can’t really convince other countries to go along with you unless you are seen as being reasonable – unless you’re being seen as willing to take the sanctions off in exchange for good behavior, unless you are seen as trying to reach a diplomatic settlement.”

Trump’s appointees, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, generally “say the right words” to keep the door open to possible negotiations with North Korea, Lewis said, but Trump often undermines their statements with his own. (Lewis said, however, that the president’s statements on Tuesday “were fine for Trump.”)

Regardless, North Korea seems to have thrown a large diplomatic ball into Trump’s court, and the world is waiting to see how the US responds.

The stakes are high, given the Trump administration push to expand America’s nuclear-weapons arsenal, and as US military forces train to face a conflict on the Korean Peninsula.